Giant electoral asteroid strikes America’s intellectual class, which fails to notice

By *Jomo Sanga Thomas

(“Plain Talk” Nov. 8, 2024)

Guest column by Matt Taibbi

The dustbin of history awaits thousands of race-baiting professional panic-mongers whose craven dishonesty gave Donald Trump a popular-vote mandate.

As election results poured in last night, revealing the incredible fact of eight years and millions of hours of hysterical propaganda somehow achieving negative results, America’s opinion-making class continued broadcasting from a magic place far up its own backside, a land no message can reach. They never learn:

Jill Fillipovic in Slate this morning:

It turns out the United States is pretty damn sexist—and a lot of men wanted this election to be about them. Their votes for Trump weren’t about just the economy, or crime, or immigration; their votes were about reasserting their dominance… Many of them desperately want female affection… but, having not exactly earned it, long for a time when female deference was essentially mandatory.

Malaika Jabali in Guardian US:

Since Trump was last in office, a plethora of podcasts and media personalities… has emerged, framing women as both oppressors and second-class citizens. Hypersexual and frigid. Cunning and simple. Gold-digging parasites while also career-driven and disgustingly independent. In the manosphere, things don’t have to make sense. They must simply invoke certain feelings. Trump is an expert at that.

Dana Bash, who’ll be headlining a lot of mocking election post-mortems, explained Trump’s win to a mute Anderson Cooper by proclaiming, “We’re all living in a manosphere now”:

Bash was also peeved at Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania who failed to obey identity expectations and fume at the Madison Square Garden “debacle.” Meanwhile, Joy Ann Reid at MSNBC said we needed to be “blunt” and identify the true culprit, white women:

Then there’s Morning Joe Scarborough, who virtually overnight went from saying “This version of Biden, intellectually, is the best Biden ever,” to imploring him post-debate to “do the right thing” and withdraw. Looking mad enough to kidnap a bus full of co-eds, Joe went on air this morning and declared Democrats “need to be honest” and admit white men weren’t the only culprits in this fiasco. “It’s misogyny from Hispanic men. It’s misogyny from black men,” he said, before chiding Democrats for not recognising “a lot of Hispanic voters have problems with black candidates.” Guest Al Sharpton heartily agreed, and added, “And with other Hispanics!”

If you’re keeping score, that means white men, white women, black men, Hispanic men, and non-White voters generally were to blame for Trump’s win. And if you were afraid the most obvious suspect of all was forgotten, David Corn of Mother Jones already found the true culprit: Russia again attacked a US election to help Trump. This should be a big deal.

Eight years ago, Donald Trump became president amid a flurry of miscalculations and arrogant misreads by political and media professionals from both parties. The commentariat first insisted he couldn’t win the Republican nomination (we were told to await the “real candidate” as he rose in polls), then told us he couldn’t win the general without endorsements and corporate backing. Then Trump did win and it became instant conventional wisdom that this impermissible political choice proved the rural malcontents who voted for him were moral troglodytes and white supremacists deserving of their fates.

A strategy of relentless vilification on the one hand and self-congratulation on the other became standard. “I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product,” chirped Hillary Clinton. “The places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.” A list of pundits (Paul Krugman was a favourite) concurred: the Trump voter was a knuckle-dragging parasite living off the coastal wealth creators, whose votes mattered more. When Joe Biden won in 2020, media quickly noted that Trump was only supported by 29% of GDP, practically the same thing as only being supported by 29% of people. White Rural Rage became the most predictable New York Times bestseller ever.

The cult of mass political psychosis was mind-blowing. Trump became a representation of evil more terrifying to laptop-class American adults than the Boogieman is to toddlers. Grown men and women rooted for the president to be proven a Russian agent. Studio audiences roared at the idea of vaccine-refusers dying. All explanations for Trump’s support other than racism and fears of “status loss” were dismissed, and his immigration policies were denounced as abhorrent and Hitlerian until Harris adopted them in this cycle. Voters were told a billion times that Trump is a fascist dictator-in-waiting and a threat to democracy. They were chided a billion more times to remember he’s a convicted criminal. Virtually every federal enforcement agency made announcements proclaiming a vote for Trump to be tantamount to aid to foreign enemies.

At the end of all this messaging, Trump gained. He went from a two-time popular-vote loser to a president with a mandate of 5 million-plus votes. Despite constant reminders of his racism, he gained with black and Hispanic voters. There are species of tapeworms that could have grasped last night that voters got tired of being stereotyped as bigots by gasbags like Reid and Scarborough and told their race or gender or whatever compelled their political choices. An infant knows this, too, is a form of racism, and that too many “you ain’t black unless…” speeches will tend to push people after a while to reach for something sharp, or give Donald Trump a landslide win.

If 71 million people giving you the finger as eight years of statements and predictions go belly up on live TV won’t budge these idiots out of their “All people who are not me are racist” bubble, nothing will. Perfect, virginal ignorance is a rare sight. We should admire theirs for the shimmering collective pearl it is, though I worry the exhibition might keep running for another ten years.

*Jomo Sanga Thomas is a lawyer, journalist, social commentator and a former senator and Speaker of the House of Assembly in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

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